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The Court Affirms Our Social Contract - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...259186 supreme court state building government function legitimacy
shared by Javier E on 30 Jun 12 - Cached
  • the federal courts are the guardians of our Constitution. That is certainly true, but it not the whole story. In fact, the most important function of the federal courts is to legitimate state building by the political branches.
  • What is "state building?" Throughout our country's history, government has taken on many new functions. The early 19th century American state actually didn't do very much more than national defense and customs collection. The executive branch was tiny. Over the years, the federal government took on more and more obligations, offering new protections and new services for its citizens. After the Civil War, Congress passed a series of civil rights laws, it created the Interstate Commerce Commission to regulate railroads, it passed an income tax, and early in the twentieth century it created a central bank. State building really took off after the New Deal, which established the modern administrative and regulatory state and added a host of labor and consumer protection regulations, investments in infrastructure, and Social Security. The National Security State was born after World War II, and the 1960s brought new civil rights laws and new social welfare programs through the Great Society. At the turn of the 21st century, the federal government expanded its national security infrastructure even further, implementing vast new surveillance programs and strategies for dealing with terrorism
  • Whenever the federal government expands its capabilities, it changes the nature of the social compact. Sometimes the changes are small, but sometimes, as in the New Deal or the civil rights era, the changes are big. And when the changes are big, courts are called on to legitimate the changes and ensure that they are consistent with our ancient Constitution.
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  • The words "legitmate" and "ratify," however, are ambiguous terms. Courts do not simply rubber stamp what the political branches do. Rather, they set new ground rules. The government may do this as long as it doesn't do that. Legitimation is Janus-faced: it establishes what government can do by establishing what the government cannot do.
  • The real constitutional struggle begins in 1968, when Richard Nixon appointed four new conservative justices to the Court in his first term. These new justices accepted and ratified the changes of the 1960s, but also limited them in important ways. They made clear that the welfare state was constitutionally permissible but not constitutionally required, held that education was not a fundamental right, limited the use of busing to achieve racial integration, and halted the Warren Court's revolution in criminal procedure. The changes in social contract were ratified, but on more conservative terms.
  • Roberts held that the individual mandate could not be justified by Congress's power to regulate interstate commerce. If it was constitutional, it was only as a tax, which gave people a choice to purchase health insurance or pay a small penalty. As I have argued for many years, this is, in fact, the correct interpretation of what the mandate does. Once this point is accepted, the argument for the mandate's constitutionality is straightforward, and Roberts quickly showed why this was true.
  • Roberts' reasoning captures the dual nature of judicial legitimation. He has said to Congress: "You may compel people to enter into commercial transactions like the insurance mandate, but you may not do so as a direct order under the commerce power. Instead, you must do it through the taxing power, always giving people the choice to pay a tax instead. And as long as you structure the mandate as a tax, the people's rights are protected because they always have the right to throw their elected representatives out of office if they don't like the tax." Roberts' opinion thus harks back to a basic source of legitimacy enshrined in the American Revolution: "No taxation without representation."
  • the Medicaid extension. He argued that Congress may create new social programs that expand protection for the poor. But Congress may not tell states that they must accept the new programs or else lose all federal contributions to existing social programs of long standing. The federal government may, if it wants, totally fund the Medicaid extension out of its own pocket without any help from the states. It may abolish the old version of Medicaid and create a new version in its place identical to the expanded version. What it may not do, Roberts argued, is to leverage States' dependence on federal money in established social welfare programs to compel States to participate in new social welfare programs.
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Inequality Is Not Inevitable - NYTimes.com - 0 views

opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/...inequality-is-not-inevitable inequality ideology corruption politics interests
shared by Javier E on 30 Jun 14 - No Cached
  • The Great Divide, a series in The New York Times for which I have served as moderator, has also presented a wide range of examples that undermine the notion that there are any truly fundamental laws of capitalism. The dynamics of the imperial capitalism of the 19th century needn’t apply in the democracies of the 21st.
  • We don’t need to have this much inequality in America.
  • Our current brand of capitalism is an ersatz capitalism.
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  • For proof of this go back to our response to the Great Recession, where we socialized losses, even as we privatized gains. Perfect competition should drive profits to zero, at least theoretically, but we have monopolies and oligopolies making persistently high profits. C.E.O.s enjoy incomes that are on average 295 times that of the typical worker, a much higher ratio than in the past, without any evidence of a proportionate increase in productivity.
  • f it is not the inexorable laws of economics that have led to America’s great divide, what is it? The straightforward answer: our policies and our politics.
  • Sweden, Finland and Norway have all succeeded in having about as much or faster growth in per capita incomes than the United States and with far greater equality.
  • why has America chosen these inequality-enhancing policies? Part of the answer is that as World War II faded into memory, so too did the solidarity it had engendered.
  • As America triumphed in the Cold War, there didn’t seem to be a viable competitor to our economic model. Without this international competition, we no longer had to show that our system could
  • Some drew the wrong lesson from the collapse of the Soviet system. The pendulum swung from much too much government there to much too little here.
  • Corporate interests argued for getting rid of regulations
  • But this ideology was hypocritical. The bankers, among the strongest advocates of laissez-faire economics, were only too willing to accept hundreds of billions of dollars from the government
  • The American political system is overrun by money. Economic inequality translates into political inequality, and political inequality yields increasing economic inequality
  • Economic and geographic segregation have immunized those at the top from the problems of those down below. Like the kings of yore, they have come to perceive their privileged positions essentially as a natural right.
  • The true test of an economy is not how much wealth its princes can accumulate in tax havens, but how well off the typical citizen is — even more so in America where our self-image is rooted in our claim to be the great middle-class society. But median incomes are lower than they were a quarter-century ago.
  • With almost a quarter of American children younger than 5 living in poverty, and with America doing so little for its poor, the deprivations of one generation are being visited upon the next
  • why is America one of the advanced countries where the life prospects of the young are most sharply determined by the income and education of their parents?
  • Those with only a high school diploma have seen their incomes decline by 13 percent over the past 35 years.
  • mass incarceration has come to define America — a country, it bears repeating, with about 5 percent of the world’s population but around a fourth of the world’s prisoners.
  • access to health care is among the most universally accepted rights, at least in the advanced countries. America, despite the implementation of the Affordable Care Act, is the exception. It has become a country with great divides in access to health care, life expectancy and health status.
  • Obamacare’s objective — to ensure that all Americans have access to health care — has been stymied: 24 states have not implemented the expanded Medicaid program, which was the means by which Obamacare was supposed to deliver on its promise to some of the poorest.
  • The problem of inequality is not so much a matter of technical economics. It’s really a problem of practical politics. Ensuring that those at the top pay their fair share of taxes — ending the special privileges of speculators, corporations and the rich — is both pragmatic and fair
  • We are not embracing a politics of envy if we reverse a politics of greed.
  • Inequality is not just about the top marginal tax rate but also about our children’s access to food and the right to justice for all. If we spent more on education, health and infrastructure, we would strengthen our economy, now and in the future.
  • We have located the underlying source of the problem: political inequities and policies that have commodified and corrupted our democracy.
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Cuts in Military Mean Job Losses for Career Staff - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...b-losses-for-career-staff.html cuts military job losses career staff US politics policy
shared by jlessner on 13 Nov 14 - No Cached
  • For the first time since the end of the Cold War in the 1990s, the Army is shrinking.
  • If funding cuts mandated by Congress continue, the Army could have fewer than 450,000 soldiers by 2019 — the smallest force since World War II.
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The Grand Budapest Hotel's Humane Comedy About Tragedy - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...385264 30s nazi czechoslovak history movie
shared by Javier E on 21 Feb 15 - No Cached
  • First, its characters are a warm tribute to the three main populations targeted by the Nazis.
  • Second, the film focuses on the Nazis’ motivations, a poisonous cocktail of bias, greed, and disdain for law.
  • Third and most important, the film’s use of comedy turns out to offer a fresh way to talk about the run-up to World War II and the Communist era that followed.
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  • The film succeeded at doing that through a comic lens—the very thing that initially troubled me.
  • Wisely, Anderson avoided the war itself and its mass murder, setting his film in the period before and after instead.
  • A similar subtlety also characterizes the film’s musings about memory and its transmission. Zero flashes back to the 1930s from the vantage point of his 1968 conversation with a writer he meets. But the 1968 meeting is itself a flashback—it's introduced and concluded by the writer, years later, looking at the camera and describing his recollections of the meeting. And that too is a flashback: The movie opens and closes with a student seated before the writer’s memorial bust in the Prague Jewish cemetery reading those very recollections in the writer’s book, The Grand Budapest Hotel. In a month when we all thought a lot about preserving history, that rendering of how stories are passed down resonated deeply.
  • Finally, the film speaks to our heartbreak at the injustice of the Holocaust and our desire for some glimmer of light—but not too much.
  • “You see, there are still faint glimmers of civilization left in this barbaric slaughterhouse that was once known as humanity.” The Grand Budapest Hotel got that just right too, and that’s no laughing matter.
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The European Prospect (Fall Preview) - 0 views

prospect.org/...european-prospect-fall-preview european prospect fall economics refugee crisis french revolution history
shared by mcginnisca on 25 Feb 16 - No Cached
  • European project after World War II was among the most noble in modern history. Germany, twice the cause of catastrophic wars, would not be punished but rebuilt, rehabilitated, and contained within a larger democratic European whole.
  • hristian Democrats called it a social market economy; social democrats thought of it as a more flexible alternative to socialism
  • urope would be not just a continent with common traditions, converging aspirations and open trade, but an emergent political federation. It would be more than a customs union—an economic union with a single currency, consistent economic rules, and social Europe balancing market Europe at a continental scale.
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  • All of the pathologies evident in the 1930s, which weighed so heavily on the minds of the EU’s architects, are resurgent—the high unemployment, the economic extremes, the perverse austerity policies, the popular backlash against ineffectual parliamentary politics, and the resulting ultra-nationalism.
  • For the right, the remedy was a return to a more laissez-faire model, even though there was little evidence that Europe’s social market had anything to do with the economic slowdown
  • For the first four postwar decades, democratically mobilized citizens in strong nation-states anchored the social part of Europe while the European Economic Community, predecessor of the EU, promoted the market part
  • WHEN JACQUES DELORS, a moderate French socialist, launched a full-blown European Union in the 1980s, the hope was to expand social Europe and market Europe in tandem. But in the actual Maastricht Treaty of 1992—Europe’s de facto constitution—free movement of goods, services, capital, and people are fundamental rights, and social protections are add-ons
  • IF EUROPE NEEDED ONE more assault to further undermine the model, it came via the refugee crisis. The crisis laid bare two awful fragilities. The first is the dysfunction of the EU as a confederation with multiple veto points and little capacity for leadership in a crisis
  • Politically, the collision of a lingering and needless economic crisis with a random refugee crisis has energized nationalism, both moderate and neo-fascist. In Norway, Sweden, Denmark, the Netherlands, France, Finland, Austria, and elsewhere, the second- or third-strongest party is far-right populist. Much of this support is working-class, at the expense of social democrats.
  • he refugee crisis also makes clear that much of Europe’s social compact assumes a common national identity, to which foreigners do not easily fit in.
  • Europe might be able to accept a million refugees economically, but it cannot do so politically. The refugee crisis is simply an overlay on a deeper crisis of solidarity and common purpose. Unless there is a renewal of popular energy and a burst of progressive leadership, the three-decade era of broadly shared prosperity—les trente glorieuses, as the French call it—will be remembered as a historical blip. The EU aspired to combine that impossible trinity of the French Revolution: liberty, equality, and fraternity. All three are now on the defensive.
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Opinion | A C.E.O. Who's Scared for America - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...eter-georgescu-capitalism.html capitalism crisis economics culture working class rich
shared by Javier E on 01 Apr 19 - No Cached
  • “The hero of my story,” Georgescu said to me “is America.” Over and over, he said, people who didn’t have any obvious reason to care about him helped him: the congresswoman who didn’t represent his parents’ district; the headmaster who’d never met him; the ad executives who mentored him.
  • All of them, he believes, were influenced by a post-World War II culture that (while deeply flawed in some ways) fostered a sense of community over individuality. Corporate executives didn’t pay themselves outlandish salaries. Workers enjoyed consistently rising wages.
  • Things began to change after the 1970s. Stakeholder capitalism — which, Georgescu says, optimized the well-being of customers, employees, shareholders and the nation — gave way to short-term shareholder-only capitalism
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  • Profits have soared at the expense of worker pay. The wealth of the median family today is lower than two decades ago. Life expectancy has actually fallen in the last few years. Not since 2004 has a majority of Americans said they were satisfied with the country’s direction.
  • “Capitalism is a brilliant factory for prosperity. Brilliant,” Georgescu says. “And yet the version of capitalism we have created here works for only a minority of people.”
  • e talks about the signs of frustration, in both the United States and Europe. He has seen societies fall apart, and he thinks many people are underestimating the risks it could happen again. “We’re not that far off,” he told me.
  • Some other business leaders are also worried about rising inequality. Warren Buffett is. So are Martin Lipton, the dean of corporate lawyers, and Laurence Fink, who runs the investment firm BlackRock. “There’s class warfare, all right,” Buffett has said, “but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning,”
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Opinion | The Real Legacy of the 1970s - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...onomy-united-states-1970s.html economics politics culture inflation 1970s supply-side deregulation taxes
shared by Javier E on 03 Feb 19 - No Cached
  • In most histories of how Americans became so polarized, the Great Inflation of the 1970s is given short shrift
  • Inflation was as pivotal a factor in our national crackup as Vietnam and Watergate
  • nflation changed how Americans thought about their economic relationships to their fellow citizens — which is to say, inflation and its associated economic traumas changed who we were as a people.
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  • It also called into question the economic assumptions that had guided the country since World War II, opening the door for new assumptions that have governed us ever since.
  • Slowly, though, inflation entered the picture. It hit 5.7 percent in 1970, then 11 percent in 1974. Such sustained inflation was something that had never happened in stable postwar America. And it was punishing. For a family of modest means, a trip to the supermarket was now a walk over hot coals.
  • Total credit card balances began to explode.
  • the average family of 1936 was near poor. Everyone was in it together, and if Bill couldn’t find work, his neighbor would give him a head of cabbage, a slab of pork belly.
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  • But the Great Inflation, as the author Joe Nocera has noted, made most people feel they had to look out for themselves
  • Throw in wage stagnation, which began in the early ’70s, and deindustrialization of the great cities of the North
  • Inflation also produced the manic search for “yield” — it was no longer enough to save money; your money had to make money, turning every wage earner into a player in market rapaciousness
  • Even as Americans scrambled for return, they also sought to spend
  • The Great Inflation was an inflection point that changed us for the worse. This moment can be another such point, but one that will change us for the better.
  • a 2006 Department of Labor study pegged the average household income of 1934-36 at $1,524. Adjust for inflation to 2018, that’s about $28,000, while the official poverty level for a family of four was $25,100
  • Americans became a more acquisitive — bluntly, a more selfish — people. The second change was far more profound.
  • John Maynard Keynes. His “demand side” theories — increase demand via public investment, even if it meant running a short-term deficit — guided the New Deal, the financing of the war and pretty much all policy thinking thereafter. And not just among Democrats: Dwight Eisenhower and Richard Nixon were Keynesians.
  • There had been a group of economists, mostly at the University of Chicago and led by Milton Friedman, who dissented from Keynes. They argued against government intervention and for lower taxes and less regulation. As Keynesian principles promoted demand side, their theories promoted the opposite: supply side.
  • Inflation was Keynesianism’s Achilles’ heel, and the supply-siders aimed their arrow right at it. Reagan cut taxes significantly. Inflation ended (which was really the work of Paul Volcker, the chairman of the Federal Reserve). The economy boomed. Economic debate changed; even the way economics was taught changed.
  • And this, more or less, is where we’ve been ever since
  • walk down a street and ask 20 people a few questions about economic policy — I bet most will say that taxes must be kept low, even on rich people, and that we should let the market, not the government, decide on investments. Point to the hospital up the street and tell them that it wouldn’t even be there without the millions in federal dollars of various kinds it takes in every year, and they’ll mumble and shrug.
  • we have a long way to go. Dislodging 40-year-old assumptions is a huge job. The Democrats, for starters, have to develop and defend a plausible alternative theory of growth
  • But others have a responsibility here too — notably, our captains of commerce.
  • They will always be rich. But they have to decide what kind of country they want to be rich i
  • Then along came Ronald Reagan. The great secret to his success was not his uncomplicated optimism or his instinct for seizing a moment. It was that he freed people of the responsibility of introspection, released them from the guilt in which liberalism seemed to want to make them wallow.
  • they can move moderate and maybe even conservative public opinion in a way that Democratic politicians, civic leaders and celebrities cannot.
  • A place of more and more tax cuts for them, where states keep slashing their higher-education spending and tuitions keep skyrocketing; where the best job opportunity in vast stretches of America is selling opioids; where many young people no longer believe in capitalism and record numbers of them would leave this country if they could?
  • Or a country more like the one they and their parents grew up in, where we invested in ourselves and where work produced a fair and livable wage?
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The Suffocation of Democracy | by Christopher R. Browning | The New York Review of Books - 0 views

www.nybooks.com/...suffocation-of-democracy democracy authoritarian fascism illiberal history
shared by Javier E on 05 Oct 18 - No Cached
  • In the 1920s, the US pursued isolationism in foreign policy and rejected participation in international organizations like the League of Nations. America First was America alone, except for financial agreements like the Dawes and Young Plans aimed at ensuring that our “free-loading” former allies could pay back their war loans. At the same time, high tariffs crippled international trade, making the repayment of those loans especially difficult. The country witnessed an increase in income disparity and a concentration of wealth at the top, and both Congress and the courts eschewed regulations to protect against the self-inflicted calamities of free enterprise run amok. The government also adopted a highly restrictionist immigration policy aimed at preserving the hegemony of white Anglo-Saxon Protestants against an influx of Catholic and Jewish immigrants. (Various measures barring Asian immigration had already been implemented between 1882 and 1917.) These policies left the country unable to respond constructively to either the Great Depression or the rise of fascism, the growing threat to peace, and the refugee crisis of the 1930s.
  • Today, President Trump seems intent on withdrawing the US from the entire post–World War II structure of interlocking diplomatic, military, and economic agreements and organizations that have preserved peace, stability, and prosperity since 1945.
  • Paul von Hindenburg, elected president of Germany in 1925, was endowed by the Weimar Constitution with various emergency powers to defend German democracy should it be in dire peril. Instead of defending it, Hindenburg became its gravedigger, using these powers first to destroy democratic norms and then to ally with the Nazis to replace parliamentary government with authoritarian rule. Hindenburg began using his emergency powers in 1930, appointing a sequence of chancellors who ruled by decree rather than through parliamentary majorities, which had become increasingly impossible to obtain as a result of the Great Depression and the hyperpolarization of German politics.
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  • Thinking that they could ultimately control Hitler while enjoying the benefits of his popular support, the conservatives were initially gratified by the fulfillment of their agenda: intensified rearmament, the outlawing of the Communist Party, the suspension first of freedom of speech, the press, and assembly and then of parliamentary government itself, a purge of the civil service, and the abolition of independent labor unions. Needless to say, the Nazis then proceeded far beyond the goals they shared with their conservative allies, who were powerless to hinder them in any significant way.
  • If the US has someone whom historians will look back on as the gravedigger of American democracy, it is Mitch McConnell. He stoked the hyperpolarization of American politics to make the Obama presidency as dysfunctional and paralyzed as he possibly could. As with parliamentary gridlock in Weimar, congressional gridlock in the US has diminished respect for democratic norms, allowing McConnell to trample them even more. Nowhere is this vicious circle clearer than in the obliteration of traditional precedents concerning judicial appointments. Systematic obstruction of nominations in Obama’s first term provoked Democrats to scrap the filibuster for all but Supreme Court nominations. Then McConnell’s unprecedented blocking of the Merrick Garland nomination required him in turn to scrap the filibuster for Supreme Court nominations in order to complete the “steal” of Antonin Scalia’s seat and confirm Neil Gorsuch. The extreme politicization of the judicial nomination process is once again on display in the current Kavanaugh hearings.
  • Like Hitler’s conservative allies, McConnell and the Republicans have prided themselves on the early returns on their investment in Trump. The combination of Trump’s abasement before Putin in Helsinki, the shameful separation of families at the border in complete disregard of US asylum law (to say nothing of basic humanitarian principles and the GOP’s relentless claim to be the defender of “family values”), and most recently Michael Cohen’s implication of Trump in criminal violations of campaign finance laws has not shaken the fealty of the Republican old guard, so there is little indication that even an explosive and incriminating report from Special Counsel Robert Mueller will rupture the alliance.
  • Republicans begin with a systemic advantage in electing senators and representatives, because the Democratic Party’s constituency has become heavily concentrated in big states and big cities. By my calculation every currently serving Democratic senator represents roughly 3.65 million people; every Republican roughly 2.51 million. Put another way, the fifty senators from the twenty-five least populous states—twenty-nine of them Republicans—represent just over 16 percent of the American population, and thirty-four Republican senators—enough to block conviction on impeachment charges—represent states with a total of 21 percent of the American population. With gerrymandering and voter suppression enhancing even more the systemic Republican advantage, it is estimated that the Democrats will have to win by 7 to 11 points (a margin only obtainable in rare “wave” elections) in the 2018 elections to achieve even the narrowest of majorities in the House of Representatives
  • In France the prospect of a Popular Front victory and a new government headed by—horror of horrors—a Socialist and Jew, Léon Blum, led many on the right to proclaim, “Better Hitler than Blum.” Better the victory of Frenchmen emulating the Nazi dictator and traditional national enemy across the Rhine than preserving French democracy at home and French independence abroad under a Jewish Socialist.
  • The fascist movements of that time prided themselves on being overtly antidemocratic, and those that came to power in Italy and Germany boasted that their regimes were totalitarian. The most original revelation of the current wave of authoritarians is that the construction of overtly antidemocratic dictatorships aspiring to totalitarianism is unnecessary for holding power
  • the most apt designation of this new authoritarianism is the insidious term “illiberal democracy.” Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in Turkey, Putin in Russia, Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines, and Viktor Orbán in Hungary have all discovered that opposition parties can be left in existence and elections can be held in order to provide a fig leaf of democratic legitimacy, while in reality elections pose scant challenge to their power. Truly dangerous opposition leaders are neutralized or eliminated one way or another.
  • Total control of the press and other media is likewise unnecessary, since a flood of managed and fake news so pollutes the flow of information that facts and truth become irrelevant as shapers of public opinion. Once-independent judiciaries are gradually dismantled through selective purging and the appointment of politically reliable loyalists. Crony capitalism opens the way to a symbiosis of corruption and self-enrichment between political and business leaders. Xenophobic nationalism (and in many cases explicitly anti-immigrant white nationalism) as well as the prioritization of “law and order” over individual rights are also crucial to these regimes in mobilizing the popular support of their bases and stigmatizing their enemies.
  • Both Mussolini and Hitler came to power in no small part because the fascist-conservative alliances on the right faced division and disarray on the left. The Catholic parties (Popolari in Italy, Zentrum in Germany), liberal moderates, Social Democrats, and Communists did not cooperate effectively in defense of democracy.
  • In the five presidential elections of the twenty-first century, Democrats have won the popular vote four times. Two of these four (2000 and 2016) nonetheless produced Republican presidents, since the Electoral College reflects the same weighting toward small, more often Republican states as the Senate. Given the Supreme Court’s undermining of central provisions of the Voting Rights Act (Shelby County v. Holder), its refusal to take up current flagrant gerrymandering cases (Gill v. Whitford for Wisconsin; Benisek v. Lamone for Maryland), and its recent approval of the Ohio law purging its voting rolls (Husted v. Randolph Institute), it must be feared that the Court will in the future open the floodgates for even more egregious gerrymandering and voter suppression.
  • The unprecedented flow of dark money into closely contested campaigns has distorted the electoral process even further. The Supreme Court decision declaring corporations to be people and money to be free speech (Citizens United v. FEC) in particular has greatly enhanced the ability of corporations and wealthy individuals to influence American politics
  • To consolidate his dictatorship, Hitler had to abolish the independent unions in Germany in a single blow. Trump faces no such problem. In the first three postwar decades, workers and management effectively shared the increased wealth produced by the growth in productivity. Since the 1970s that social contract has collapsed, union membership and influence have declined, wage growth has stagnated, and inequality in wealth has grown sharply. Governor Scott Walker’s triumph over public sector unions in Wisconsin and the recent Supreme Court decision striking down mandatory public sector union dues (Janus v. AFSCME) simply accelerate a process long underway.
  • Alongside the erosion of an independent judiciary as a check on executive power, other hallmarks of illiberal democracy are the neutralization of a free press and the steady diminution of basic human rights
  • In Trump’s presidency, those functions have effectively been privatized in the form of Fox News and Sean Hannity. Fox faithfully trumpets the “alternative facts” of the Trump version of events, and in turn Trump frequently finds inspiration for his tweets and fantasy-filled statements from his daily monitoring of Fox commentators and his late-night phone calls with Hannity. The result is the creation of a “Trump bubble” for his base to inhabit that is unrecognizable to viewers of PBS, CNN, and MSNBC and readers of The Washington Post and The New York Times. The highly critical free media not only provide no effective check on Trump’s ability to be a serial liar without political penalty; on the contrary, they provide yet another enemy around which to mobilize the grievances and resentments of his base. A free press does not have to be repressed when it can be rendered irrelevant and even exploited for political gain.
  • the curtailment of many rights and protections Americans now enjoy is likely. Presumably marriage equality will survive, given the sea change in American public opinion on that issue. But the right of businesses and individuals to discriminate against gays is likely to be broadly protected as a “sincerely held religious belief.” Chief Justice John Roberts’s favorite target, affirmative action, is likely to disappear under his slogan that to end racial discrimination, one must end all forms of racial discrimination. And a woman’s right to abortion will probably disappear in red states, either through an outright overturning of Roe v. Wade or more likely through narrower rulings that fail to find any “undue burden” in draconian restrictions that in practice make abortion unavailable. And equal protection of voting rights is likely to be eroded in red states through ever more insidiously designed voter suppression laws and gerrymandering once the Supreme Court makes clear that it will not intervene to curb such measures
  • No matter how and when the Trump presidency ends, the specter of illiberalism will continue to haunt American politics. A highly politicized judiciary will remain, in which close Supreme Court decisions will be viewed by many as of dubious legitimacy, and future judicial appointments will be fiercely contested. The racial division, cultural conflict, and political polarization Trump has encouraged and intensified will be difficult to heal. Gerrymandering, voter suppression, and uncontrolled campaign spending will continue to result in elections skewed in an unrepresentative and undemocratic direction. Growing income disparity will be extremely difficult to halt, much less reverse.
  • Finally, within several decades after Trump’s presidency has ended, the looming effects of ecological disaster due to human-caused climate change—which Trump not only denies but is doing so much to accelerate—will be inescapable. Desertification of continental interiors, flooding of populous coastal areas, and increased frequency and intensity of extreme weather events, with concomitant shortages of fresh water and food, will set in motion both population flight and conflicts over scarce resources that dwarf the current fate of Central Africa and Syria. No wall will be high enough to shelter the US from these events. Trump is not Hitler and Trumpism is not Nazism, but regardless of how the Trump presidency concludes, this is a story unlikely to have a happy ending.
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The Armenian Genocide - 0 views

www.thoughtco.com/-armenian-genocide-1915-195758 Armenian Genocide WW2
shared by g-dragon on 02 Mar 18 - No Cached
  • From the fifteenth century on, ethnic Armenians made up a significant minority group within the Ottoman Empire. They were primarily Orthodox Christians, unlike the Ottoman Turkish rulers who were Sunni Muslims.  Armenian families were subject to the and to heavy taxation. As "people of the Book," however, the Armenians enjoyed freedom of religion and other protections under Ottoman rule.
  • To make matters worse, other Christian regions began to break away from the empire entirely, often with aid from the Christian great powers. Greece, Bulgaria, Albania, Serbia...  one by one, they broke away from Ottoman control in the last decades of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries.
  • The Armenian population began to grow restless under increasingly harsh Ottoman rule in the 1870s.  Armenians started to look to Russia, the Orthodox Christian great power of the time, for protection.
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  • Abdul Hamid II intentionally provoked uprisings in Armenian areas
  • Local massacres of Armenians became commonplace,
  • In the spring of the following year, a counter-coup made up of Islamist students and military officers broke out against the Young Turks. Because the Armenians were seen as pro-revolution, they were targeted by the counter-coup, which killed between 15,000 and 30,000 Armenians in the Adana Massacre.
  • the Ottoman Empire lost the First Balkan War, and as a result, lost 85% of its land in Europe. At the same time, Italy seized coastal Libya from the empire. Muslim refugees from the lost territories, many of them victims of expulsion and ethnic cleansing in the Balkans, flooded into Turkey proper to the discomfort of their fellow subjects. Up to 850,000 of the refugees, fresh from abuse by Balkan Christians, were sent to Armenian-dominated regions of Anatolia. Unsurprisingly, the new neighbors did not get along well.
  • Embattled Turks began to view the Anatolian heartland as their last refuge from a sustained Christian onslaught.  Unfortunately, an estimated 2 million Armenians called that heartland home, as well.
  • Enver Pasha ordered that all Armenian men in the Ottoman armed forces be reassigned from combat to labor battalions, and that their weapons be confiscated. Once they were disarmed, in many units the conscripts were executed en masse.
  • The Armenians quite rightly suspected a trap, and refused to send their men out to be slaughtered, so Jevdet Bey began a month-long siege of the city.  He vowed to kill every Christian in the city. 
  • this Russian intervention served as a pretext for further Turkish massacres against the Armenians all across the remaining Ottoman lands.
  • From the Turkish point of view, the Armenians were collaborating with the enemy.
  • Red Sunday incident
  • Tehcir Law, also known as the Temporary Act of Deportation, authorizing the arrest and deportation of the country's entire ethnic Armenian population.
  • These acts set the stage for the genocide that followed.
  • Hundreds of thousands of Armenians were forcibly marched out into the Syrian Desert and left there without food or water to die. Countless others were crammed onto cattle cars and sent on a one-way trip on the Baghdad Railway, again without supplies. Along the Turkish borders with Syria and Iraq, a series of 25 concentration camps housed starving survivors of the marches.
  • In some areas, the authorities didn't bother with deporting the Armenians. Villages of up to 5,000 people were massacred
  • The people would be packed into a building which was then set on fire.
  • thrown overboard to drown.
  • In 1919, Sultan Mehmet VI initiated courts-martial against high military officers for involving the Ottoman Empire in the First World War.
  • they were accused of planning the elimination of the empire's Armenian population.
  • The victorious Allies demanded in the Treaty of Sevres (1920) that the Ottoman Empire hand over those responsible for the massacres. Dozens of Ottoman politicians and army officers were surrendered to the Allied Powers
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The good economic news is actually bad. Here's why. - The Washington Post - 0 views

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shared by Javier E on 03 Feb 18 - No Cached
  • In his essay “Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren,” Keynes, seeking to dispel pessimism, predicted that, “assuming no important wars and no important increase in population,” the “permanent problem of the human race” — the “struggle for subsistence” — “may be solved.”
  • This, Keynes warned, could discombobulate the human race’s neurological wiring, because mankind has evolved through many millennia for toil and stress. Basic “habits and instincts” are unsuitable for a future of leisure and abundance. Because we have evolved as creatures designed by nature “to strive and not to enjoy.” So, work would have to be apportioned, perhaps in three-hour shifts and 15-hour workweeks, to keep people preoccupied.
  • In 1943, Paul Samuelson, who would become one of America’s leading economists and win a Nobel Prize, anticipated peace with foreboding. Good things — demobilization of more than 10 million from the armed services, the economy no longer busy producing instruments of destruction — would cause bad things. There would be “the greatest period of unemployment and industrial dislocation which any economy has ever faced.” Any economy. Ever.
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  • A 2015 Federal Reserve study revealed that half of those surveyed said they could not gather $400 to cope with an emergency; one-third said they could not sell assets, tap retirement savings or turn to family and friends to pay three months of expenses.
  • In December, America’s household savings rate was the lowest (2.4 percent of disposable income) since the negative savings rates in 2005 and 2006, before the housing bubble burst.
  • As of 2013, 45 percent of working-age households had no retirement savings.
  • This stroll down memory lane suggests this rule: All news is economic news, because everything affects the economy, or reveals attitudes or behaviors that soon will affect it. And all economic news is bad — especially good economic news, because it gives rise to bad behavior.
  • By 2017, median household savings ($14,500) for those near retirement age had declined 32 percent in a decade, and for the first time, older Americans had more credit card debt than younger Americans.
  • Between 2003 and 2015, the indebtedness of those between ages 50 and 80 increased 60 percent. Today, those between 65 and 74 have five times more debt than that age cohort did two decades ago.
  • Do you wonder how such behavior became to seem normal? A partial answer might be:
  • Americans consider deferral of gratification unnatural, which it is. Time was, however, thrift was considered a virtue. People sat at kitchen tables, calculating how to bring their outlays, for living and retiring, into alignment with their incomes.
  • But eventually many people decided: This is no fun. Instead, let’s disconnect enjoyable spending decisions from tiresome facts about resources, thereby living the way the federal government does.
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How Saikat Chakrabarti became AOC's chief of change - The Washington Post - 0 views

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shared by Javier E on 12 Jul 19 - No Cached
  • Chakrabarti had an unexpected disclosure. “The interesting thing about the Green New Deal,” he said, “is it wasn’t originally a climate thing at all.” Ricketts greeted this startling notion with an attentive poker face. “Do you guys think of it as a climate thing?” Chakrabarti continued. “Because we really think of it as a how-do-you-change-the-entire-economy thing.”
  • Chakrabarti liked the answer. “The thing I think you guys are doing that’s so incredible is … you guys are actually figuring out how to do it and make it work, the comprehensive plan where it all fits together,”
  • Nationwide economic mobilization. Justice. Community. Ricketts kept laying down chords in Chakrabarti’s key. It was an acknowledgment of just how far inside establishment Washington the progressive movement has reached. Everything is intersectional now — including decarbonization.
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  • he went from politically disengaged techie to fired-up activist to insurgent insider. He didn’t mention that he also deserves much of the credit for recruiting AOC to run in first place.
  • we’ve got a completely different theory of change, which is: You do the biggest, most badass thing you possibly can — and that’s going to excite people, and then they’re going to go vote. Because the reality is, our problem isn’t that more people are voting Republican than Democrat — our problem is most people who would vote Democrat aren’t voting.”
  • San Francisco was a shock. “You see, like, holy crap, is this the dystopian future we’re signing up for?” he says. “I mean, it’s just huge amounts of wealth and some very rich people, and then just poverty and homelessness very visually and very viscerally.
  • yes, climate change is an existential threat, but there’s also kind of this existential issue of why is it that as our society is progressing … things seem to be regressing and getting worse for a large number of people? Why is that happening? How do we fix that?”
  • Initially, he doubted the answer lay in political engagement — a learned cynicism, he thinks, of his generation having grown up watching wars, recession and bank bailouts. “We’ve only ever seen the establishment win,
  • “He saw how our organizing worked, and he was able to imagine the [software] tools that we needed and just build them himself,” Exley told me. “He was just a super-humble, super-level-headed guy.
  • Nasim Thompson, who also helped recruit candidates, told me: “It was clear from the very beginning that the ship was moving with his guidance. … He was so focused that it naturally created a gravitational pull. … He was sort of relentless in that, and simultaneously just so pleasant, it was shocking. Almost not human. I used to say, ‘How do you stay so Zen?’ ”
  • “It was a total failure, but we also had no idea that one or two victories would have as much of an earth-shattering impact like AOC’s victory did,”
  • “It was a learning experience to find out that Alexandria, but also Ilhan, Rashida and Ayanna, just by being strong leaders within Congress and continuing to act the way they did during the campaign, to a large extent, can actually move stuff so fast and so massively and so big. … One of my favorite things Alexandria said recently was: We’re not just changing the Democratic agenda, we’re changing the Republican agenda. Because now there’s Republicans putting out climate plans.”
  • A draft of the mission statement brainstormed at a staff retreat begins: “To boldly and decisively spur a people-led movement for social, racial, environmental and economic justice.”
  • Chakrabarti is a student of America’s past economic mobilizations in the face of crisis, such as Franklin Roosevelt’s original New Deal during the Great Depression, and the industrial retooling necessary to build the material to win World War II
  • he often circled back to one of his core convictions, which is that voters really will turn out for bold ideas scaled big enough to tackle today’s crises of climate and inequality. What he needed — what the movement needed — was more data to convince skeptics, especially centrist Democrats.
  • “The basic argument of the progressive wing versus the centrist wing of the Democratic Party right now is the centrists think the way to win is tack to the middle, try to convince Republicans,” he said on the first call. “Progressives think the way to win is mobilizing and convince people to vote for something. So how do you actually test that hypothesis before the actual election?”
  • Chakrabarti’s worldview is founded on his utter certainty not just that the progressive vision is good for America — but that it is what most Americans actually want. Yet what if he is wrong?
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Opinion | The Wave That Could Carry Trump to Re-election - The New York Times - 0 views

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shared by Javier E on 19 Jun 19 - No Cached
  • our “America First” president ought to be viewed in a global context
  • surveys taken more than a year before Election Day are meaningless
  • Mr. Trump benefits from incumbency and continued economic recovery, and he’s riding a wave of national populism that has yet to crest.
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  • Only two of the nine presidents up for re-election since World War II have lost. In the past century the public has booted a party from the White House after a single term just once
  • The United States is not engaged in a major war. And the economic recovery that began in mid-2009 has continued under Mr. Trump, with unemployment at half-century lows. Manufacturing employment has increased. Economic growth approached 3 percent last year. The Dow Jones industrial average has increased by about a third since Inauguration Day 2017
  • The willingness and capacity of electorates to absorb large numbers of newcomers would be on the ballot. The answer was not what leaders had in mind.
  • Mr. Trump was among the first heralds of an anti-elitist turn that has disrupted politics from London to Melbourne. The issues animating this upheaval have not disappeared.
  • Behind the rise of outsider politicians such as Mr. Trump are the interrelated issues of unchecked immigration, terrorism and the imposition of carbon taxes and other measures to mitigate climate change
  • Elites’ inability or lack of interest in tackling these problems — or even seeing them as problems — generates a crisis of representation in which large numbers of voters look for alternatives
  • Mr. Trump is wary of foreign entanglements, and a slowdown is not the same as a recession. Sustained peace and prosperity improve Mr. Trump’s chances of a second term.
  • The attacks at the Bataclan theater in Paris in November 2015, at an office party in San Bernardino, Calif., two weeks later and at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Fla., in June 2016 heightened fears of terrorism. Elites downplayed the ideology of the assailants for fear of an anti-Muslim backlash, opening themselves up to charges of political correctness
  • Efforts to fight climate change through regulation, international treaties and carbon pricing provoked a similar anti-elitist response.
  • What unites these issues is the idea that elites insulate themselves from the costs of the policies they impose on others. It is the idea on which Mr. Trump and his anti-elitist supporters base their campaigns
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How Trump?s attempts to win the daily news cycle feed a chaotic coronavirus response - ... - 0 views

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shared by Javier E on 04 Apr 20 - No Cached
  • But in Trump’s White House, certain symptoms remain: a president who governs as if producing and starring in a reality television show, with each day a new episode and each news cycle his own creation, a successive installment to be conquered.
  • Facing a global pandemic, Trump still seems to lurch from moment to moment, with his methods and messages each day disconnected from — and in some cases contradictory to — the ones just prior.
  • Trump has focused on his self-image — claiming credit wherever he believes it is owed, attempting to project strength and decisiveness, settling scores with critics, boasting about the ratings of his televised news conferences and striving to win the cable news and social media wars.
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  • Lapan added that it is important for the president to address the public about a topic as serious as the pandemic but said Trump should quickly “turn it over to the experts and leave, and not turn it into this stream of consciousness of every topic he wants to talk about and the adoration that seems to be required from everybody else who participates.”
  • “Trump is a sales guy, and it’s all about point of sale,” said Stuart Stevens, a longtime Republican operative and frequent Trump critic. “It’s not about repeat customers and follow-ups. He wants to get the sale — that’s it — he wants to sell you the undercoating for your car, and it’s not his problem if the car breaks driving off of the lot.”
  • Trump’s mind at times was elsewhere. A few hours before his news conference, he took to Twitter to brag about the high television ratings of his coronavirus updates, noting that they were on par with the season finale of “The Bachelor,” an ABC reality hit.
  • At day’s end, when Trump strode into the White House press briefing room to deliver a coronavirus update, he turned over the presidential lectern to an array of business executives, who alternately praised him and pitched their products.
  • The potpourri quality of Trump’s message to a nation in crisis that day was a stark contrast to Franklin D. Roosevelt, who as president during the Great Depression and World War II offered his reassurances in a series of fireside chats broadcast nationally — and he limited them to have maximum impact.
  • “He only delivered these fireside chats every couple of months, when there was an essential moment for the president to speak,”
  • “Someone said to him, ‘Why don’t you go on the radio every night? Your speeches are so effective.’ He said, ‘If my speeches become routine they will lose their effectiveness.’ And he said, ‘It takes me three or four days to work on a fireside chat — and I have to run the country, too.”
  • By Tuesday, Trump had finally come to acknowledge the sheer magnitude of the crisis.
  • the president and his medical experts offered a somber and grim projection: In a best-case scenario, and with strict abidance by social distancing, between 100,000 and 240,000 Americans would die of the coronavirus.
  • The worst-case scenario was even more horrifying: Without community mitigation measures, the models presented by the White House predict 1.5 million to 2.2 million Americans could die.
  • Lockhart said that Tuesday’s news conference was a concerted effort by the administration to “rewrite history,” after two months of Trump playing down the threat of the virus. He added that there appeared to be a political calculation as well: By revealing specific projected fatalities, Trump laid the groundwork to be able to claim victory ahead of November’s election if the death toll is substantially less than predicted.
  • The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had developed new guidance to mitigate the coronavirus, recommending all Americans wear face masks, and as with many announcements by the federal government, Trump chose to unveil it himself.
  • But he risked diluting the effectiveness of the measure — designed to prevent asymptomatic carriers of the virus from spreading to others — by stressing it was voluntary and musing at Friday’s news conference that he wouldn’t be seen wearing a mask himself.
  • his vanity, it seemed, could not abide wearing a mask.Asked why he opposed covering his nose and mouth as the CDC recommends, Trump struggled to articulate his hesitation.“Somehow sitting in the Oval Office behind that beautiful Resolute Desk — the great Resolute Desk — I think wearing a face mask as I greet presidents, prime ministers, dictators, kings, queens, I don’t know. Somehow, I don’t see it for myself.”
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How policy decisions spawned today's hyperpolarized media - The Washington Post - 0 views

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shared by Javier E on 18 Jan 19 - No Cached
  • it’s worth stepping back to remember that this is a recent development, and that the polarization of the media stems in large part from public policy decisions. Such polarization was not inevitable or in any way natural.
  • In the decades that followed World War II, the big three television networks dominated the news. Together with a few major metropolitan newspapers, they set the tone for the national conversation.
  • on virtually all these programs, journalists steered clear of a partisan perspective.
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  • Much of this approach was shaped by the Fairness Doctrine. A policy of the Federal Communications Commission beginning in 1949, the doctrine was based on the notion that the television networks were “public trustees.” Licensed by the federal government, they ought to serve the entire nation, the argument went, by airing competing perspectives on controversial issues. While the policy had been intended to foster a full and fair debate, in practice it led networks to avoid employing anchors or reporters with obvious biases and to play most issues down the middle.
  • Almost overnight, the media landscape was transformed. The driving force was talk radio. In 1960, there were only two all-talk radio stations in America; by 1995, there were 1,130. While television news on the old networks and the cable upstart CNN still adhered to the standard of objectivity, radio emerged as a wide-open landscape
  • In the 1980s, all of this changed. President Ronald Reagan believed the marketplace, not the government, was the best arbiter for competing viewpoints (and for much else).
  • Reagan’s FCC promptly killed it. The Democratic Congress tried to restore the doctrine, but Reagan vetoed the bill.
  • In the landmark Red Lion Broadcasting Co. Inc. v. FCC in 1969, the court ruled that the Fairness Doctrine was constitutional. Free speech, the justices held, was “the right of the viewers and listeners, not the right of the broadcasters.” Therefore, the networks had to provide “ample play for the free and fair competition of opposing views.”
  • By 1995, conservatives accounted for roughly 70 percent of all talk-radio listeners
  • By 1994, he had an audience of 20 million Americans tuning in on some 650 stations. “What Rush realizes, and what a lot of listeners don’t,” an Atlanta station manager explained, “is that talk-radio programming is entertainment, it is not journalism.”
  • President George H.W. Bush courted the radio giant in the hope of winning over his right-wing listeners. In June 1992, the president invited Limbaugh to the White House for an overnight stay in the Lincoln Bedroom. In a telling detail, Bush insisted on carrying Limbaugh’s bag into the White House himself. In exchange for such self-abasement, Limbaugh threw his full support behind the president.
  • For conservatives, the success of their ideology on talk radio proved that their suspicions about the Fairness Doctrine had been right. Conservative voices had long been ignored in the mainstream media, they claimed, but now that the free market had been unchained, it was clear what the people wanted.
  • Rush Limbaugh emerged as a national conservative celebrity. With regular attacks on “commie-libs,” “feminazis” and “environmentalist wackos,” Limbaugh quickly cultivated a loyal audience of self-styled “Dittoheads.” Others in the industry took their cues from him. “I’m not sure where the business is going,” Bill O’Reilly told a friend in 1993. “But my gut says it’s going in the direction of Rush, and, man, I’m going to be there.”
  • The end of the Fairness Doctrine had drastically changed the standards of news.
  • cable television entrepreneurs realized that they, too, could thrive by providing the news from a partisan perspective. In 1996, Rupert Murdoch launched Fox News,
  • “Talk-radio shows started to go crazy” with coverage of Clinton’s misdeeds, NBC network president Bob Wright remembered. “We were not paying much attention to it at NBC News. And MSNBC wasn’t. CNN wasn’t. And what Fox did was say, ‘Gee, this is a way for us to distinguish ourselves. We’re going to grab this pent-up anger — shouting — that we’re seeing on talk radio and put it onto television.' ”
  • After 9/11, the network flourished as a full-throated supporter of the war on terrorism. In contrast to its rival CNN, which consciously framed its coverage for a diverse international audience, Fox News increasingly played to conservative viewers at home with nationalistic and populist themes.
  • “Am I slanted and biased?” Fox anchor Neil Cavuto once said in response to critics. “You damn well bet. … You say I wear my biases on my sleeve. Well, better that than pretend you have none, but show them clearly in your work."
  • nder Trump, the merger of the media giant and modern conservatism has been completed. Several of its hosts serve as informal advisers to the president, while some Fox-affiliated figures, such as former network executive Bill Shine and on-air host Heather Nauert, have taken formal roles in the Trump administration.
  • Liberals have had their news outlets, too, of course. Late in the Bush presidency, MSNBC became a left-leaning operation, and the liberal “blogosphere” flourished online
  • But liberals never replicated in scale or scope anything like Fox News or Limbaugh. In the end, none of the liberal outlets formed as cohesive a loyal alliance with the Democratic Party as conservative broadcasters did with the GOP.
  • And that fracturing and polarization can be traced, in large part, to the end of the Fairness Doctrine
  • Though some now seek to revive it, the doctrine is a relic of the past. Today’s communication landscape — including cable, social media and both traditional and satellite TV — is far too unruly for federal officials to regulate. Nor should they try.
  • Polls reveal that the public dislikes the form our media have taken and might be receptive to new models that push back against the partisan tide. If the public demands new models of information, including some that reflect the evenhandedness that ruled during the heyday of the Fairness Doctrine, we may yet see another media revolution.
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Our Elites Still Don't Get It - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...axes-republicans-congress.html morality foundation narrative community institutions culture politics Crisis
shared by Javier E on 17 Nov 17 - No Cached
  • John Bowlby is the father of attachment theory, which explains how humans are formed by relationships early in life, and are given the tools to go out and lead their lives
  • “All of us, from cradle to grave, are happiest when life is organized as a series of excursions, long or short, from the secure base provided by our attachment figures.”
  • The relationships that form you are mostly things you didn’t choose: your family, hometown, ethnic group, religion, nation and genes.
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  • The things you do with your life are mostly chosen: your job, spouse and hobbies.
  • At our foundation, we were a society with strong covenantal attachments — to family, community, creed and faith. Then on top of them we built democracy and capitalism that celebrated liberty and individual rights.
  • The deep covenantal institutions gave people the capacity to use their freedom well. The liberal institutions gave them that freedom.
  • This delicate balance — liberal institutions built atop illiberal ones — is now giving way. The big social movements of the past half century were about maximizing freedom of choice. Right-wingers wanted to maximize economic choice and left-wingers lifestyle choice. Anything that smacked of restraint came to seem like a bad thing to be eliminated.
  • We’ll call this worldview — which is all freedom and no covenant — naked liberalism
  • The problem with naked liberalism is that it relies on individuals it cannot create.
  • Naked liberals of right and left assume that if you give people freedom they will use it to care for their neighbors, to have civil conversations, to form opinions after examining the evidence. But if you weaken family, faith, community and any sense of national obligation, where is that social, emotional and moral formation supposed to come from? How will the virtuous habits form?
  • Naked liberalism has made our society an unsteady tree. The branches of individual rights are sprawling, but the roots of common obligation are withering away.
  • Freedom without covenant becomes selfishness. And that’s what we see at the top of society, in our politics and the financial crisis
  • First, they will identify themselves according to race. They will become the racial essentialists you see on left and right
  • And that’s what we see at the bottom of society — frayed communities, broken families, opiate addiction.
  • Freedom without a unifying national narrative becomes distrust, polarization and permanent political war.
  • covenantal attachments they become fragile. Moreover, if you rob people of their good covenantal attachments, they will grab bad ones.
  • Freedom without connection becomes alienation.
  • Then they resort to tribalism. This is what Donald Trump provides. As Mark S. Weiner writes on the Niskanen Center’s blog, Trump is constantly making friend/enemy distinctions, exploiting liberalism’s thin conception of community and creating toxic communities based on in-group/out-group rivalry.
  • Trump offers people cultural solutions to their alienation problem. As history clearly demonstrates, people will prefer fascism to isolation, authoritarianism to moral anarchy.
  • If we are going to have a decent society we’re going to have to save liberalism from itself. We’re going to have to restore and re-enchant the covenantal relationships that are the foundation for the whole deal. The crucial battleground is cultural and prepolitical.
  • In my experience, most people under 40 get this. They sense the social and moral void at the core and that change has to come at the communal, emotional and moral level.
  • Many public intellectuals were trained in the social sciences and take the choosing individual as their mental starting point. They have trouble thinking about our shared social and moral formative institutions and how such institutions could be reconstituted.
  • Congressional Republicans think a successful tax bill will thwart populism. Mainstream Democrats think the alienation problem will go away if we redistribute the crumbs a bit more widely.
  • History is full of examples of nations that built new national narratives, revived family life, restored community bonds and shared moral culture: Britain in the early 19th century, Germany after World War II, America in the Progressive Era. The first step in launching our own revival is understanding that the problem is down in the roots.
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Amid High Drama, Biden Declares Democracy Has Survived, Unity Possible - WSJ - 0 views

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  • Over the last five decades, Joe Biden endured multiple personal tragedies and saw his political obituary written over and over again—yet always found a way to pick up the pieces and move forward.
  • Mr. Biden was sworn in amid extraordinary circumstances: an ongoing pandemic, the glaring absence of an outgoing president who refused to accept the legitimacy of last year’s election, the scars of a mob attack designed to prevent him from taking office still visible on the Capitol just behind him, the nation’s first woman and first minority vice president at his side.
  • The first was that democracy has survived a severe blow. The second was that unity is possible. And the third was that the country will need that unity to weather a coronavirus storm that will continue to rage for a while longer.
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  • Yet for the first time since the Civil War, that reassurance was necessary. That’s because this transfer of power actually wasn’t peaceful. It was disrupted by violence while the counting of electoral-college votes was disrupted by violent attack.
  • “To overcome these challenges, to restore the soul and secure the future of America requires so much more than words,” he said. “It requires the most elusive of all things in a democracy. Unity. Unity.” He specifically called for the political leaders surrounding him to “lower the temperature.”
  • Finally, he warned the nation that the coronavirus, which has stalked the land and hobbled the economy for 10 months, isn’t done doing its damage. The nation already has lost more to the pandemic than it did in all of World War II, he said, yet “we are entering what may be the toughest and deadliest period of the virus. We must set aside politics and finally face this pandemic as one nation, one nation.”
  • Having spent more than four decades in the Senate and the White House, Mr. Biden has genuine friendships on which he can draw in a time of political blood feuds. His call to end divisive rhetoric and lower the national temperature, which was seen almost as an anachronistic throwback when he stressed it at the outset of his political campaign, now seems precisely the right message for the moment.
  • Millions of Trump supporters don’t, at the moment, accept the legitimacy of Mr. Biden’s election. Ideological warfare between left and right is possible—and may already have begun as Republicans protested a series of executive orders Mr. Biden immediately issued to overturn Trump policies on his own authority.
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Opinion | My Grandparents' Immigration Lies Shaped My Father's View of Justice - The Ne... - 0 views

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shared by cartergramiak on 27 Apr 21 - No Cached
  • “The Blumstein family, consisting of Mr. B, age 43, his wife, same age, and their two children, ages 6½ and 2½ arrived in the United States on 12/21/50,” begins the social worker’s minutely detailed account of my grandparents’, and my father’s, first weeks as refugees in the United States.
  • My father was born stateless in Uzbekistan in 1945, as World War II was winding down. His Polish-born Jewish parents had spent years in flight — first to Russia in 1939, when Hitler invaded their home country, only to be deported via cattle cars into forced labor in Siberia. My father’s older brother perished of diphtheria during the war. Postwar, my grandparents boarded trains west, but at the Polish border heard the news that nearby villagers had murdered Jews who returned and gave up on their plan to reclaim their home.
  • “Misrepresentation in visa and citizenship applications is a matter of U.S. immigration law, and few if any of the normal due process rights accorded to defendants in criminal trials apply,” my father wrote in his memoir, “Lies That Matter,” which will be published next month. “And so deportations to the U.S.S.R. followed by a firing squad were seen as not really ‘punitive,’ as if lives were not at stake.” To my father this was not justice: The immigration system did not take into consideration whether the punishment fit the crime. He left O.S.I. after 18 months.
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  • My father had come to recognize that in contrast to what so many of today’s most vulnerable immigrants face, the system his family encountered ultimately supported them. He also knew intimately that lives are at stake.
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Opinion | Joe Biden Is Electrifying America Like F.D.R. - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...biden-fdr-americans.html US history
shared by saberal on 04 May 21 - No Cached
  • The best argument for President Biden’s three-part proposal to invest heavily in America and its people is an echo of Franklin Roosevelt’s explanation for the New Deal.
  • We should be cleareyed about both the enormous strengths of the United States — its technologies, its universities, its entrepreneurial spirit — and its central weakness: For half a century, compared with other countries, we have underinvested in our people.
  • in my hometown, Yamhill, the New Deal was an engine of opportunity. A few farmers had rigged generators on streams, but Roosevelt’s rural electrification brought almost everyone onto the grid and output soared. Jobs programs preserved the social fabric and built trails that I hike on every year. The G.I. Bill of Rights gave local families a shot at education and homeownership.
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  • Yet beginning in the 1970s, America took a wrong turn. We slowed new investments in health and education and embraced a harsh narrative that people just need to lift themselves up by their bootstraps
  • What does that mean in human terms? I’ve written about how one-quarter of the people on my old No. 6 school bus died of drugs, alcohol or suicide — “deaths of despair.” That number needs to be updated: The toll has risen to about one-third.
  • The most important thread of Biden’s program is his plan to use child allowances to cut America’s child poverty in half. Biden’s main misstep is that he would end the program in 2025 instead of making it permanent; Congress should fix that.
  • Roosevelt started a day care program during World War II to make it easier for parents to participate in the war economy. It was a huge success
  • Then there are Biden’s proposed investments in broadband; that’s today’s version of rural electrification. Likewise, free community college would enable young people to gain technical skills and earn more money, strengthening working-class families.Some Americans worry about the cost of Biden’s program.
  • As many Americans have criminal records as college degrees. A baby born in Washington, D.C., has a shorter life expectancy (78 years) than a baby born in Beijing (82 years). Newborns in 10 counties in Mississippi have a shorter life expectancy than newborns in Bangladesh. Rather than continue with Herbert Hoover-style complacency, let’s acknowledge our “grave internal disorder” and summon a doctor.
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Trump's Pardons: The List - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...who-did-trump-pardon.html Trump Pardons Clemency
shared by lmunch on 20 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • With hours to go before President Trump left office, the White House released a list early Wednesday of 73 people he had pardoned and 70 others whose sentences he had commuted.
  • On the list were at least two people who had worked for Mr. Trump: Stephen K. Bannon, his former chief strategist, and Elliott Broidy, a former top fund-raiser. Both received full pardons.
  • The rapper Lil Wayne, born Dwayne Michael Carter Jr., received a full pardon after pleading guilty to possession of a firearm and ammunition by a felon in December. Mr. Trump also granted a commutation to another rapper, Kodak Black, whose legal name is Bill Kapri (though he was born Dieuson Octave). In 2019, he was sentenced to nearly four years in prison for lying on background paperwork while attempting to buy guns.
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  • Mr. Trump issued full pardons to Nicholas Slatton and three other former U.S. service members who were convicted on charges related to the killing of Iraqi civilians while they were working as security contractors for Blackwater, a private company, in 2007.
  • Mr. Manafort, 71, had been sentenced in 2019 to seven and a half years in prison for his role in a decade-long, multimillion-dollar financial fraud scheme for his work in the former Soviet Union. He was released early from prison in May as a result of the coronavirus pandemic and given home confinement. Mr. Trump had repeatedly expressed sympathy for Mr. Manafort, describing him as a brave man who had been mistreated by the special counsel’s office.
  • Mr. Stone, a longtime friend and adviser of Mr. Trump, was sentenced in February 2020 to more than three years in prison in a politically fraught case that put the president at odds with his attorney general. Mr. Stone was convicted of seven felony charges, including lying under oath to a congressional committee and threatening a witness whose testimony would have exposed those lies.
  • Mr. Kushner, 66, the father-in-law of the president’s older daughter, Ivanka Trump, pleaded guilty in 2004 to 16 counts of tax evasion, a single count of retaliating against a federal witness and one of lying to the Federal Election Commission. He served two years in prison before being released in 2006.
  • Michael T. Flynn, a former national security adviser who twice pleaded guilty to lying to the F.B.I. about his conversations with a Russian diplomat, and whose prosecution Attorney General William P. Barr tried to shut down, was the only White House official to be convicted as part of the Trump-Russia investigation.
  • The Supreme Court has ruled that the Constitution gives presidents unlimited authority to grant pardons, which excuse or forgive a federal crime. A commutation, by contrast, makes a punishment milder without wiping out the underlying conviction.
  • Joe Arpaio, an anti-immigration crusader who enjoyed calling himself “America’s toughest sheriff,” was the first pardon of Mr. Trump’s presidency.
  • Conrad M. Black, a former press baron and friend of Mr. Trump’s, was granted a full pardon 12 years after his sentencing for fraud and obstruction of justice.
  • Former Gov. Rod R. Blagojevich of Illinois was sentenced in 2011 to 14 years in prison for trying to sell or trade to the highest bidder the Senate seat that Mr. Obama vacated after he was elected president.
  • Susan B. Anthony, the women’s suffragist, was arrested in Rochester, N.Y., in 1872 for voting illegally and was fined $100. Mr. Trump pardoned her on Aug. 18, the 100th anniversary of the ratification of 19th Amendment, which extended voting rights to women.
  • Edward J. DeBartolo Jr., a former owner of the San Francisco 49ers, pleaded guilty in 1998 to concealing an extortion plot. Mr. DeBartolo was prosecuted after he gave Edwin W. Edwards, the influential former governor of Louisiana, $400,000 to secure a riverboat gambling license for his gambling consortium.
  • Alice Marie Johnson was serving life in a federal prison for a nonviolent drug conviction before her case was brought to Mr. Trump’s attention by the reality television star Kim Kardashian West.
  • Jack Johnson, the first Black heavyweight boxing champion, was tarnished by a racially tainted criminal conviction in 1913 — for transporting a white woman across state lines — that haunted him well after his death in 1946. Mr. Trump pardoned him on May 24, 2018.
  • Dinesh D’Souza received a presidential pardon after pleading guilty to making illegal campaign contributions in 2014. Mr. D’Souza, a filmmaker and author whose subjects often dabble in conspiracy theories, had long blamed his conviction on his political opposition to Mr. Obama.
  • Zay Jeffries, a metal scientist whose contributions to the Manhattan Project and whose development of armor-piercing artillery shells helped the Allies win World War II, was granted a posthumous pardon on Oct. 10, 2019. Jeffries was found guilty in 1948 of an antitrust violation related to his work and was fined $2,500.
  • Ten years ago, Bernard B. Kerik, a former New York City police commissioner, was sentenced to four years in prison after pleading guilty to eight felony charges, including tax fraud and lying to White House officials.
  • I. Lewis Libby Jr., known as Scooter, was Vice President Dick Cheney’s top adviser before Mr. Libby was convicted in 2007 of four felony counts, including perjury and obstruction of justice, in connection with the disclosure of the identity of a C.I.A. officer, Valerie Plame.
  • Mr. Trump’s decision to clear three members of the armed services who had been accused or convicted of war crimes signaled that the president intended to use his power as the ultimate arbiter of military justice.
  • Michael R. Milken was the billionaire “junk bond king” and a well-known financier on Wall Street in the 1980s. In 1990, he pleaded guilty to securities fraud and conspiracy charges and was sentenced to 10 years in prison, though his sentence was later reduced to two. He also agreed to pay $600 million in fines and penalties.
  • Dwight Hammond and his son, Steven Hammond, were Oregon cattle ranchers who had been serving five-year sentences for arson on federal land. Their cases inspired an antigovernment group’s weekslong standoff at the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in Oregon in 2016 and brought widespread attention to anger over federal land management in the Western United States.
  • David H. Safavian, the top federal procurement official under President George W. Bush, was sentenced in 2009 to a year in prison for covering up his ties to Jack Abramoff, the disgraced lobbyist whose corruption became a symbol of the excesses of Washington influence peddling. Mr. Safavian was convicted of obstruction of justice and making false statements.
  • Angela Stanton — an author, television personality and motivational speaker — served six months of home confinement in 2007 for her role in a stolen-vehicle ring. Her book “Life of a Real Housewife” explores her difficult upbringing and her encounters with reality TV stars.
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Russia Threatens To Cut Ties With EU If Sanctions Are Imposed Over Jailing Of Navalny :... - 0 views

www.npr.org/...r-jailing-of-opposition-leader russia Politics policy economics
shared by carolinehayter on 12 Feb 21 - No Cached
  • Russia said Friday that it is prepared to cut ties with the European Union if the bloc slaps economic sanctions on the Kremlin in retaliation for the detention of opposition leader Alexei Navalny.
  • In the event that we again see sanctions imposed in some sectors that create risks for our economy, including in the most sensitive spheres," he said.
  • "We don't want to isolate ourselves from global life, but we have to be ready for that. If you want peace then prepare for war,"
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  • slander charges that he has denounced as politically motivated.
  • Navalny, who narrowly survived a poisoning in August that is widely seen as an attempted assassination by the Kremlin, was jailed after his return from Germany, where he was receiving treatment after the attack.
  • The slander charges against Navalny stem from his alleged defamation of a World War II veteran who appeared in a video backing constitutional reforms aimed at allowing Putin to extend his stay in office past 2024.
  • Last week, the EU's high representative for foreign policy, Josep Borrell, visited Russia, reportedly to plead for Navalny's release and in hopes of easing tense relations with the Kremlin. Instead, he was rebuffed and embarrassed, with Russia expelling three EU diplomats while he was holding talks.
  • He said the Kremlin sees democracy as an "existential threat."
  • "Domestically, it reinforces official propaganda about hostile interference from abroad, incursions on Russia's sovereignty and the activity of foreign agents," Frolov wrote. "On the foreign policy front, it frees the Kremlin from having to stage what the West calls 'malicious actions' with the goal of provoking retaliatory anti-Russian actions that would consolidate Russian society around the flag of the ruling regime."
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